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Republicans Pretending To Govern

This post originally appeared at Speak Out California
A good op-ed appeared Saturday in the Boston Globe, America’s faux government. The writer discusses how many parts of our federal government seem to no longer be functioning.

They sent everybody home a long time ago, set timers to make the lights go on, and locked the doors. Government is so much more cost efficient if nobody actually does anything.

We read about drugs harming people while drug companies make huge profits — where was the Food and Drug Administration? We read about the Federal Aviation Administration asking the airlines to inspect themselves, and the airlines having to cancel so many flights because they didn’t,

Whoever is still pretending to work there must have made Employee of the Month.

Why is this happening?

So we’re now living in a Libertarian country, where the government doesn’t actually provide any services except defense. The problem? We’re paying taxes as if we live in a social democracy where the government provides all services except defense. They don’t need defense because they have found that if you stop teaching history in schools, people forget that you actually need it sometimes.
How can you tell that we are Libertarians now? Because business is not complaining all the time. When the government is actually showing up for work, business groups say that they are being Crushed By Overregulation. Choked by Bureaucracy. I haven’t heard a word of that in a long time, but it used to be the anthem of American business. OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was on the news every night – truly, every night. When was the last time you heard of OSHA showing up for a surprise inspection?

Please go read the rest.
The column is written partially as humor, but the reality is there. We elected people who hate government to run our government, and look what has happened. They said regulations are bad, inspectors are intrusive and oversight should be “voluntary.” The have stopped the regulators and inspectors and overseers from regulating and inspecting and overseeing.
The last several years saw the libertarian dream realized. Government was largely shut down. And what happened? Did this experiment bring “liberty?” Did the working person prosper in an “ownership society?”
No, what happened was what all the reality-based, experienced, practical people said would happen if we implement a libertarian system: the corporations immediately filled the vacuum and began to enrich themselves at the public’s expense. And when Katrina came around, people were left on their own.
So what do we learn from this? I think it is important to remember that “the government” is not some “they” that just showed up from nowhere and “tells us what to do.” The government is US, you and me and the rest of us, organized together to help each other. And it is up to US to keep an eye on things, for each other. When we listen to smiling hucksters who offer easy answers using nice-sounding words we ought to be extra careful. Tax cuts have brought us mountains of debt. Government cutbacks have brought us bad roads, bad schools and really, really bad disaster relief. And deregulation has brought us a corporate state.
Taxes, services, regulation and oversight have all become bad words. But now that we have performed the libertarian experiment we can see the consequences of this kind of thinking. It turns out that taxes are an investment in our future. It turns out that government services are us taking care of each other. It turns out that regulations keep the marketplace playing field level, which allows to enjoy the benefits of innovating businesses. It turns out that oversight keeps our government honest. And it turns out that conservative disdain for all of these didn’t make government better, it made government worse.Click through to Speak Out California

2 thoughts on “Republicans Pretending To Govern”

shorter version:
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

shorter version:
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”